Orbx PNW NA Blue Released!

Welcome to North America, and Orbx's most ambitious project to date. Over twelve months in the making, the FTX Pacific Northwest region is truly a stunning achievement which combines all the elements of the much celebrated FTX AU region series, but goes much further. To PNW we have amped the quality of the ground textures to the next level, and sourced them from pristine imagery to create beautifully crisp terrain even at ground level.

Going further, we've added photoreal areas above the tree line to many mountains, glaciers, lava flows, as well as including photoreal Seattle CBD, the ports of Tacoma and Olympia, KPAE, Bonneville Dam and many other POI's. Additionally we have created brand new autogen textures, hand-crafted every square mile of landclass, included full moving traffic, 3D night lighting and much more! The icing on the cake? Over 400 airports in the region have been upgraded with custom buildings and objects, elevation corrections and other details.

FTX PNW is going to reinvent bush flying, and to celebrate Orbx is also releasing many small to medium airports for this area.

Related: FSAddon's Vancouver to be updated...

Jon Patch, the main desiger of VancouverPlus, explains on his blog “ Holger (Sandmann) and I are working on a Vancouver+ update for the upcoming FTX Pacific Northwest product (FSX only), aka FTX NA Blue. Photography is complete (thanks, Nigel!), and modelling and other work is progressing... As well as compatibility with FTX PNW, new features will include:

detailed 1m satellite photoreal imagery for the entire downtown area, south shore of False Creek and the East Side and North Shore dock areas. This replaces the existing 1999 5m imagery.

completely redone autogen for the photoreal coverage area: much more dense and accurate

new buildings: the Vancouver Convention Centre, the Fairmont Hotel and the Living Shangri-La

a couple of bug fixes

These updates will be available for free for existing Vancouver+ users, regardless of whether they buy the FTX product or not…..”.

FTX PNW purchasers who have not bought Van+ to date, will be able to purchase a discounted version of Van+ for €25. They will get the key elements of Vancouver+ which are not redone in FTX PNW: custom bridges, buildings, photoreal coverage, AI, sounds, waterfalls, detailed CYPK and CYNJ and other unique features….”.

VancouverPlus will be available via FSAddon Publishing of course, AFTER Orbx’s release.

New Helicopter Flight Models from Hovercontrol

Helicopter Total Realism ver. 1.0 - HTR is a physics library that replaces FSX helicopter physics. You can create your own configuration files for your favorite helicopters. Helicopter Total Realism (HTR) is a program that overrides FSX FS9 flight model with a more realistic model.

All the helicopter reactions are calculated using formulas taken from different aerodynamic books. Every helicopter can be configured using a .cfg file similar to the aircraft.cfg but with custom parameters used by the application to model the physics profile.

I have included a full manual with samples on how to create your own configurations.

Data is passed to and from FS using FSUIPC, so it works on FSX and FS9.

New FSX Concorde Preview

As we’ve entered beta testing of the Concorde-X, we decided it was time we gave a first video preview of our soon-to-be-released work, which we hope will make flight sim enthusiasts and novices alike really appreciate the talent of our development team. We’ve put a lot of effort in this product, this video preview is but a token of the sophistication, modeling and visual beauty found in the FSX Concorde-X!

Area 51 C-5M Galaxy

The Lockheed C-5 Galaxy is a large, military transport aircraft built by Lockheed. It was designed to provide strategic heavy airlift over intercontinental distances and to carry outsize and oversize cargo. The C-5 Galaxy has been operated by the United States Air Force since 1969 and is one of the largest military aircraft in the world.

Features

ASE (ActiveSky Evolution) from HiFiSim

Active Sky Evolution is the next installment in the Active Sky series, bringing further refinement and accuracy in weather synthesis and depiction, improved smoothing, increased high-fidelity aircraft compatibility, a new graphical look and many other behind-the-scenes improvements to further increase your desktop flight and weather simulation experience!

The Active Sky series, first released in 2002, has been continually developed in effort to provide the most realistic and enjoyable weather simulation engine possible for Microsoft Flight Simulator users. Supporting both FS9 and FSX, this latest version offers tons of useful features including universal graphics add-on compatibility, graphics snapshots with weather influence, an in-flight weather display gauge, realistic wake turbulence, vertical air simulation, comprehensive weather and flight planning, full graphical mapping and much, much more.

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McPhat Studios Repaints

Just a quick note, looks like we missed this, there are some new HD repaints from McPhat Studios, check them out below!

A few small items from Captain Sim

Check out Captain Sim for new items such as 727 Demos, and a lot more. Head on over to Captain Sim.

Recommendations

E-Mails and Voicemails

FSX PC's

Hi guys, I'm in the UK and follow your podcasts all the time - keep them coming. I've been simming since the days of FS98 but generally I've always been running behind in terms of hardware - low budget and lack of research on my part to blame. This time I've commited to get a decent spec geared entirely around FSX, but it will also run other applications as it will be a main computer. My current Core 2 Duo at 2.4Ghz and 2gb ram fails miserably and even at base settings with sparse terrain I get un-flyable frame rates.

So what is the best way to tackle this? Perhaps I could fire a few questions at you guys?

1. Core i7 or Quad (Q9650 e.g)?

2. Does FSX benefit from the "8" cores of the i7?

3. I don't want to overclock as I don't know how so what speed should I look for?

4. What RAM? I intend to run Windows 7 64 bit, does this benefit FSX? If not which OS?

5. Which graphics card? I read somewhere that nVidia seem to work best.

6. I know little to nothing about motherboards. Do they actually make a difference in terms of visual performance if all other elements are kept the same?

Incidentally, I learned to fly (back in '92) before I owned a PC but since since FS9 and latterly FSX I'm amazed at the levels of realism being replicated.

Thanks guys, much obliged. Regards, Dan

St. Barts Landing with Fly Tampa scenery

Hey Guy's, I just wanted to share with you my first attemt at making a video. I've been putting this off a long time always afraid it would just be to hard and require a lot of expensive equipment. But I discovered it's really not that hard. I downloaded the free version of Frapps, and used the built in Windows Live Moviemaker. Since this was a Carribean setting, I chose what I thought was a catchey tune for the background. And was pretty amazed how it turned out. Mabe you can urge some of your viewers / listeners who are putting it off to give it a try. I have attached a link to my video. Thanks and keep up the great work. Phil Raulston ( BigDBlue )